I haven’t any right to criticise books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

I’ve never even read Nelson Algren, but let’s milk him once more. This is from the same Paris Review interview I linked to yesterday. Here he’s discussing James T. Farrell, the author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy trilogy:

Well, I don’t feel he’s a good writer. . . . I don’t think he’s a writer, really. . . . Farrell is stenographic, and he isn’t even a real good stenographer. He’s too sloppy. In his essays he compares himself with Dreiser, but I don’t think he’s in Dreiser’s league. He’s as bad a writer as Dreiser — but he doesn’t have the compassion that makes Dreiser’s bad writing important.

Bergdorf Blondes should inspire readers everywhere to rise up and rip one another limbless. . . . In all seriousness: we must build a tiny apocalypse-proof time capsule. If we can resist the temptation to burn Plum Sykes’s book, we can smuggle it into the future. Perhaps the next breed of humanoids can learn from the holocaust of culture and commerce that destroyed our icky civilization. . . . If you have any sense of justice at all, the publication of this book demands that you rouse yourself from the couch this very second and set out to loot and burn Manhattan.

(Of course, Sicha, given his history at Gawker, is not one to talk about the holocaust of culture, but hey…)

Although Wodicka turns up a provocative thought here and there, this musing, typical of Burt’s grief-laden vaporousness, serves also to illustrate the artless, wordy and underarticulated writing that makes All Shall Be Well such a Black Death of a chore to read.